Friday, February 18, 2011

Scientists Searching For God?!

Throughout history things that people could not understand were attributed to God. One by one this "God of the Gaps" eroded as science explained phenomena in the context of natural laws.

The laws of nature are, at the most fundamental level, subsets of the laws of physics.

Sir Isaac Newton published the first laws of physics in the late 17th century. His mathematical description of the motion of planets destroyed part of the church doctrine that included the dual universes of Aristotle and the geocentric paradigm of Ptolemy that had existed for nearly two millennia.

Not a whole lot of things to pick on (maybe I'm feeling a bit mellow this morning). But towards the end, there's a rather strange statement.

Today a group of scientists are undertaking a controversial search for God in the twisted logic of quantum mechanics.

I don't think this is true, even in light of Hawking's recent book. To be able to do research on anything, the premise must first be clearly defined. In other words, something must, first of all, be falsifiable for there to be a scientific endeavor on it. Can that criteria be applied to "god"? Considering also that there's so many different versions of that god, and the various "characteristics" of these gods, I don't think that can tackle such a thing.

Still, it is true that science will continue to address the gaps in our knowledge. After all, that is what science does best, and that is what scientists have been hired to do. And if by doing that, we are indirectly searching for the "god of the gaps" (or more like falsifying the god IN the gap), then so be it.